One of the perks of having friends slightly older than myself is watching them live through life stages before me.  It's like Cliffs Notes friends, a wonderful way to see what lies ahead on the life path. 

One of my friends used to have a habit of chancing upon something perfect and wonderful and would tell me, "After all these years--after a lifetime of searching--I have found the true, ultimate, amazing secret to  (fill in the blank)."

She would rave about her new haircut or teaching method or relationship or car.  She would tell me how wrong she'd been about X before finding Y.  I would listen, amazed, happy that older age meant being able to finally spot those true and amazing things that would answer all of life's questions.  There was hope for me after all. There was salvation at the end of the line, just ahead, as I rounded the bend.

And then she'd get a new haircut, hairdresser, hair color.  "I really hated that cut," she'd say. "It wasn't me.  I wanted it to be me, but it wasn't."

Her words always stunned me into silence because I was still holding on tight to the idea that she'd found it.  I thought that because she'd discovered the perfect haircut, I would eventually find the same.  Because she finally managed to learn how to talk with her brother and worked out all the kinks in their tortured relationship, I would do the same with my sibling.

And then her brother would start drinking again, communication would fall apart, her family disintegrating before her.  She would say, "I thought I'd learned how to be with him, but I was wrong.  It wasn't real.  A relationship built on a house of cards and funhouse mirrors."

Back to the starting block, the drawing board, the gate.

How was I to grow wiser, older, better, smarter, kinder, and more damn evolved if there was no evolution to be had?  How can I ever find the "right thing if my friend could not?  How could I manage this balance if even someone like Oprah was back at the drawing board a thousand times--though, of course, each of her revolutions of self makes her the big dough.

How was there any nirvana to be had on this earth at all?

After about the hundredth conversation of this nature, it struck me that growing older, growing wiser was an acceptance of the fact that there wasn't an "it" to be found.  That life involved about 300 hairstyles, 45 stabs at relationships with hard relationship people, five new cars, sixteen new teaching styles, and countless attempts and failures at everything else.

Growing older and wiser meant realizing that there was no final resting ground for sanity, health, perfection, completion, and finish--except death, of course, and do we even get to savor that accomplishment?  Who knows?  No one comes back to tell us.

Growing older and wiser means realizing that we are a true work in progress, a person as lump of clay in an art studio.  Build us up into a great figure, turn us on the wheel a few times in admiration, and then smash us down and start over.

There's no shame in this.  This is life.  The attempt and then the acceptance that we need to grow and change and hold onto and let go of myriad things as we age and move toward that light at the end of the tunnel.  We grow older and we grow older.  Maybe not wiser, but ready, open, accepting, and full of anticipation of the next haircut, relationship conversation, and student.  We learn that this attempt at living is the reward.  We get to keep trying.

"What next," we should say.  "Bring it on."

Jessica